Burnout has been measured against perfectionism in 43 sets of findings on 9,838 people, and the result should change how you read your own exhaustion. High standards were not what burned people out. Those who aimed high were, if anything, a little better protected. What went with burnout was the other half of perfectionism: the worry about falling short.
You know the scene. You collapse into bed exhausted and wake eight hours later feeling as if you pulled an all-nighter. Meanwhile your coworker, who drinks wine every night, skips workouts and lives on takeout, wakes up refreshed. You track your sleep, prep your meals for the week, take the supplements and meditate when you can.
Doing everything right is fine. Doing it with a clenched jaw is the trouble, and it explains the coworker. Nobody is marking their evenings.
You came by the worry honestly. Across 41,641 students tested between 1989 and 2016, perfectionism rose in every form, and the form that rose most was the sense that other people demand it.
Call the result energy debt. You keep making deposits, the sleep, the food, the exercise, and the account stays empty because something is drawing on it around the clock.
1. Wired and tired
Ordinary tiredness crashes hard and sleeps deep. Energy debt is the other kind: bone-tired, and unable to switch off.
It can be measured. Ten poor sleepers and ten good sleepers, matched for age, sex and weight, spent a day and a half in a sleep lab. The poor sleepers' bodies used more oxygen at every hour, day and night. The gap was still there in stretches of unbroken sleep. And although they slept worse, they were less sleepy by day than the good sleepers.
That is the engine left running in the car park. For those ten people the phrase is literal: they were burning resources around the clock.
2. The body gives it away
You wake with your jaw clenched. You jump at ordinary noises. You feel your phone buzz in your pocket, take it out, and find nothing there.
That last one is common. Of 169 hospital staff, 68% had felt a phone or pager vibrate when it had not. A body that stays on call starts hearing the call.
3. The recovery that became a second job
This is the trap for anyone who got here by optimising. You apply the same method to getting better.
You download five apps to track sleep, heart rate, food and mood. The morning routine swells to ninety minutes of meditation, journaling, cold water and breathing. You feel guilty about a lie-in. Missing a session brings the same dread as missing a deadline. The recovery has become more demanding than the life it was meant to repair.
Then it turns into an identity, and the identity hides the cause. Perfect morning routines mask toxic jobs. Ideal sleep schedules compensate for draining relationships. Optimal nutrition covers financial stress. You have built another layer of doing on top of the thing that is wrong.
The word was always a warning. "Perfect" comes from the Latin perfectus: finished. A perfectionist is someone who never is. is a whole book on letting go of who you think you are supposed to be.
It also breaks. Life disrupts the elaborate routine, and you drop all of it at once.
One thing has been measured against this worry. Among 541 teenagers and 515 adults, the link between perfectionism and depression was weaker in those who were kinder to themselves. It is a snapshot, so no proof of cause. It is also free.
You may need to recover from your recovery.
Write down your health rules, and mark the ones you would feel guilty breaking. The marked ones are the debt.
4. When relaxing makes it worse
Meditation leaves you agitated. A massage makes you fidget. You lie in the bath composing emails.
This has a name, relaxation-induced anxiety: a spike of anxiety during the practice meant to remove it. One account of it: the worrier fears the drop from calm into bad news more than the worry itself, so staying braced feels safer than letting go.
It is no rare quirk. Of 1,232 regular meditators, about a quarter reported particularly unpleasant experiences they put down to their practice. It was commoner in people given to going over and over their worries.
If stillness winds you up, stop forcing stillness. Calm with something in it works better. When about a hundred people spent a few minutes a day for a month on meditation or on one of three breathing exercises, all four lifted mood and eased anxiety, and the exercise built on long, slow out-breaths did best.
A walk, or a few breaths with the out-breath longer than the in-breath. Leave the silent cushion for later.
5. The tracker that grades your night
Sleep clinics have a name for the patient made sleepless by sleep data: orthosomnia, which they describe as "a perfectionistic quest for the ideal sleep". The people in question arrive with a wearable, a poor score, and a conviction that the tracker is right, whatever a proper sleep test says.
The score is shakier than it looks. When seven consumer sleep trackers were run against a full sleep-lab recording in 34 adults, they were good at telling sleep from wake and inconsistent at sleep stages. They did worse on nights of poor sleep, which are the nights you look.
A verdict also has a force of its own. In two experiments, 164 people were told, at random, that their night had been above average or below it. The ones told they had slept badly did worse on tests of attention and of finding words. How they said they had slept made no difference. What they had been told did.
Economics has a law for the sleep score. Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Checking a recovery score first thing is the same act as checking work email first thing. Trying harder at sleep has the same effect, and Chronic Insomnia: Why Trying Harder Keeps You Awake covers that side of it.
Leave the score unread until evening.
6. The workout that takes more than it gives
Exercise is a stress, a good one when you can recover from it. In athletes, too much training with too little rest has a recognised result: fatigue, worse performance and low mood, arriving together.
You are probably no athlete, and the arithmetic is the same. A hard session added to a hard week is a withdrawal.
The easy session is the better bet. Thirty-six tired, inactive adults did easy exercise, moderate exercise or none for six weeks, and the easy sessions did more to ease tiredness than the moderate ones.
The sign. You leave the gym more tired than you arrived, and sleep worse that night.
Swap the hard sessions for walking for two weeks, and see which way your mornings go.
7. The weekend lie-in
Sleep in at the weekend and you fly across time zones twice a week without leaving the house. It has a name, social jet lag: the gap between the clock in your body and the one on the wall. In a large survey, more of it went with a higher body weight, beyond anything short sleep explained.
Can the weekend pay off the week? In a sleep lab, adults kept short of sleep all week and then allowed to sleep as long as they liked at the weekend made up about an hour in total. Their body clocks shifted later, and when the short nights started again they ate more after dinner and put on weight.
Regular hours may matter more than long ones. Among 60,977 adults who wore a motion sensor for a week, the more regular sleepers were 20 to 48% less likely to die over the following years than the least regular. Regularity predicted it better than hours of sleep did. That is a link and no proof, and it points the same way as the lie-in.
8. What no routine reaches
Sometimes the problem is your circumstances, and your habits were never the issue.
Among 197,473 working adults followed for about seven years, the 15% who reported job strain were 23% more likely to have a first heart attack or die of heart disease.
The World Health Organization describes burnout by three signs: exhaustion, a growing distance from your job, and feeling less effective at it. It ties burnout to work stress that has gone unmanaged.
"Burn-out" began with people who were giving everything: in 1974 the word was used of the volunteer staff at a free clinic, by one of the volunteers.
No morning routine reaches a boss who changes priorities by the hour, a home where you walk on eggshells, or a mortgage that eats half your income. If the debt has a creditor, name it. That is a harder job than buying magnesium, and it is the one that pays. If the creditor is work, is the book to start with.
If the eggshells are fear of someone you live with, that is beyond any stress advice. Reach out for help.
9. The holiday that makes you ill
You finally stop, and you get a headache.
When 1,893 Dutch adults were asked, about 3% recognised themselves as people who fall ill at weekends or on holiday. Headache, tiredness, muscle pain and nausea were the commonest complaints. What marked them out was a heavy workload and a strong sense of responsibility, and trouble with the move from work to no work.
So feeling worse in the first days off proves nothing against rest. It shows how far there was to come down.
10. The coffee holding it together
In daily drinkers, the morning cup mostly undoes the tiredness and low mood that a night without caffeine has built. A strong coffee taken six hours before bed still cut people's sleep by more than an hour, and they were unaware of it.
Three or four cups to function is a loan against tonight. It also hides how tired you are, which is the one reading you need.
Is it something else?
Energy debt leaves your interests alone. You still want to do the things you love and have nothing left to do them with. If the wanting has gone too, and the flatness has been there most of the day, every day, for more than two weeks, that points to depression. Reach out for help.
Worry that is hard to control, with tension, poor sleep and tiring easily, on most days for six months or more, is generalised anxiety, a condition with treatments of its own. It would also explain why relaxing backfires on you. That one is worth asking for help with as well.
And tiredness can have a plain physical cause. Low iron, a slow thyroid and sleep apnoea each leave clues, and Why Am I Always Tired: When Chronic Exhaustion Has a Cause That Sleep Can't Fix lists them with the test for each.
If any effort, physical or mental, leaves you worse for days, that is the pattern of ME/CFS, where pushing through is the wrong rule. Get it checked.
Where to start
Start with one change, and make it a dull one: the same wake time seven days a week. An will do it, and it keeps the phone and its scores out of the bedroom. Add nothing else for two weeks.
Keep one measure, and keep it off a screen. Can you fall asleep without your mind racing?
Then take things away before you add any. One app. One supplement, and Why Most Stress Supplements Fail (And the 9 Worth a Look) will help you choose which. One hard session. What high achievers find hardest is the thing this needs: strategic surrender in place of relentless effort.
Your coworker with the wine and the takeout is no healthier than you. They are less worried. The wine is no secret weapon, either: alcohol at any amount breaks up the second half of the night. You can keep every good habit you have and stop marking them. Voltaire passed on the Italian proverb for it: "The best is the enemy of the good."
Set one alarm, for the same time every day, and leave the rest alone.
Wondering what all that strain does to the body? Stuck in Survival Mode: What Chronic Stress Does to the Body — what a stress alarm that never switches off does, system by system, and what sounds the all-clear.
Not sure what rest would even look like? Why You're Always Tired: The Rest You're Missing — the rest that sleep, workouts and clean eating leave out, and how to get it.
Know someone with five health apps and no energy? Send them this, and tell them it is not homework.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional. If your mood has been low for weeks or you're having thoughts of harming yourself, reach out for help today.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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